Word: soul
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with bandits and bursts of gunfire. The heroine is a serf girl, blinded as the result of a violent quarrel between master and slave. She seems to be meant to symbolize Russia, forever the victim of the conflict between barbarism and the simple, instinctive virtue that exists in its soul...
...metaphor is not inappropriate: though Boris Vian wrote the novel in 1946, the world it created seems more in tune with perceptions at a stoned-soul picnic than with the view from a bistro in post-war Paris. In a brief preface Vian explains that the book's "material realization consists in projecting reality obliquely and enthusiastically onto another surface which is irregularly corrugated and so distorts everything...
...luminescence of the drapes sucked his face in and he looked out. A bear drove by in a station wagon. A great big bear's smile left a trial of light. We're in a city, he thought. Us, the walls, the bear, the streets. Our poorly schooled soul looking through the drapes is encased in a cadaverous face. The eyes of the face have no significance save their cheerful twinkle, winkle one night. Out smile is friendly and wolfish. Our teeth nash concepts. The eaten letters are sparkling bits of dirty ice. We don't feel so all alone...
Larry Thrunch (played by David Sonenberg, who studied acting in London before coming here) makes a delightful hero as he begins to regret selling his soul to the Spirit of Law (Ed Overtree, a Princeton Triangle alumnus) in order to be "Number One" and catch the affections of Mary Wealth (Gretchen Hackbarth, a B.U. drama major). Sonenberg and Overtree make a slick, professional pair as they battle competing students and then each other. Like the rest of the cast, they can sing, although everyone at times has difficulty being heard...
There is a degree of surprise and disappointment in this book. Those who read Soul On Ice know that Eldridge Cleaver can write. From the standpoint of style and evocation, however, many of these pieces are clearly not up to his ability, though sufficient to qualify as well-written. A few of the pieces were tossed onto paper (or tape) just in time to meet a deadline; still others simply did not call forth his full abilities. When he wrote of Huey and the Panthers, though, it was most literally something else. Excitement, lucidity, precision of phrase, name it. Then...